Pope´s visit to the Atatürk Mausoleum is "an unpleasant surprise"

The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) described the Pope´s visit to the Atatürk Mausoleum in Ankara on Tuesday as "an unpleasant surprise". "The records in the Vatican archives should have sufficed to inform the head of the Roman Catholic Church that in the 20s and 30s under Kemal Atatürk hundreds of thousands of Christians were killed and several million expelled", said the GfbV General Secretary, Tilman Zülch.

After the genocide of the Young Turks against some 1.5 million Armenians and some 500,000 Assyrian-Aramaic Christians, Atatürk continued the elimination of the Christians. At least 200,000 Christians in the region of the port of Smyrna, today Izmir, and in East Thrace in the European part of Turkey were the victims of mass murder under his rule. According to other estimates up to 250,000 Christians could have been killed. At least two million Greek Orthodox, but also Armenian and Assyrian-Aramaic Christians from the Pontos (Cappadocia) and Ionia and Arabian Christians from Sandchak-Alexandrette, the modern Iskenderun, were driven out. So the number of Christians in the total population inside the boundaries of modern Turkey fell within 50 years from 20 percent to about 0.1 percent.